Adorno on Music: A Reconsideration Gary Zabel The Musical Times, Vol. 130, No. 1754 (Apr., 1989), 198-201. Stable URL: htp//links,jstor.org/sici?sic!=0027-4666% 28 198904%29130%3A 1754%3C198%3A AOMAR%3E2.0,CO%3B2-U The Musical Times is currently published by Musical Times Publications Lid. ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hhup:/www.jstororg/about/terms.hml. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. 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On the whole, the few exceptions to such neglect prove the general rule. Plato considered music in several of his Dialogues, but solely as an instrument of the education of moral character in the ideal political state. Schopenhauer devoted important sections of The World as Will and Representation to music, but he was interested in musical phenomena only to the extent that they substantiated his peculiar metaphysical doctrine of blind striving as the ground of existence. Nietzsche accorded music a central role in his philosophy, but only insofar as it was able to evoke the Dionysian revel that he sought to reintroduce into European culture. In each case, music was subordinated to an extrinsic philosophical purpose rather than considered on its own unique and demanding terms. ‘Theodor Adorno broke this long tradition of neglect and external interpretation. Undoubtedly, an exten- sive musical background prepared the way for achievement. Adorno was instilled with an early love for music by his mother, Maria Cavell-Adorno, a pro- fessional singer, and her unmarried sister, Agathe, a successful pianist. From childhood he learned the piano with Bernard Sekles, also the teacher of Hindemith. Adorno continued his musical education at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, taking courses in music while working on his doctorate in philoso- phy. In 1924, at the age of 21, he attended a perfor- mance of excerpts from Alban Berg’s new opera, Wozzeck, by which, as he later wrote, he was ‘over- come’. Through the intercession of a’ mutual friend, the conductor of the performance, Hermann Scherchen, Adorno persuaded Berg to take him on as, a student in Vienna. On arriving in the Austrian capi- tal following the completion of his doctorate, Adorno entered the circle of innovative composers around 198 Arnold Schoenberg, whose early work he continued to champion for the rest of his life. Although he had serious aspirations as a composer, Adorno was not prolific, and had considerable difficulty getting his ‘compositions performed. He was vastly more success- ful writing about music than creating it, From 1928 to 1932 he assumed the editorship of the Viennese jour- nal Anbruch, organ of the ‘new music’ of the Schoenberg circle. Until his death, he wrote as a music critic for the newspapers, music journals, and for radio, Of the twenty-three volumes of his collected ‘writings, more than half are devoted to music, notable among them being a series of monographs on ‘Wagner, Mahler, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Berg. It ‘would be impossible to attempt to summarise this massive and complex body of thought in the short space of the present article, There is no substitute for an often painful, though always enlightening, immer- sion in Adorno’s own writings on music. Stil, these ‘writings pivot around an identifiable thematic core: they all have reference to the central topic of the rela- tion of music to social realty, In this respect, they are rooted in Adorno’s most basic philosophical con- cerns. Along with such figures as Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm, he was a mem ber of the Institute of Social Research, which was attached to the University of Frankfurt before it was forced into temporary exile in the United States by Hitler's rise to power. The Frankfurt School was one of the primary intellectual sites at which a flexible, ‘Western’ version of Marxist social thought emerged in the inter-war period. In addition to its rejection of Stalinist political practice, Western Marxism distin- quished itself from its Eastern counterpart by its refusal to interpret cultural phenomena as a super- structural reflection of a determining economic base. Soviet thinkers regarded cultural products as immedi- ate expressions of contending standpoints in the struggle between economic classes. From their point of view, the facts of economics served as straightfor- ward explanations of the facts of culture. For Adorno and his fellow Frankfurt theoreticians, Marxist insight consisted not in such reductionist explana- tions but rather in adoption of the standpoint of thesocial ‘totality’, Within this totality cultural phenome- na, and especially works of art, possess an auto- nomous status. This means that they must be explained in terms of the formal laws that govern their production. But they must also be explained with reference to the social whole that they help com- prise. ‘According to Adorno, then, music is both auto- nomous and an element of society. These two charac- teristics may seem to be contradictory, but they are in fact deeply connected. The autonomy of music does not stand in opposition to its social character; on the contrary, itis itself a social product. Its linked to the rise of modern bourgeois society in the 18th and 19th centuries. In its heroic phase, the period of its strug- gle against the feudal ancien régime, the European bourgeoisie emancipated music from its earlier implantation in religious and other ritual context and established it as an independent art. Adorno's friend, Walter Benjamin, characterised the process of aesthetic secularisation as the loss of the ‘aura’ of the work of art, ofits immediate and magical authority as an instrument of ritual and cult.’ In Benjai ork of art, in the premodern era, was a symbol of divine transcendence; in the modern per od, it became the concern of a specialised branch of culture, and therefore an object of conscious Technik. But while Benjamin located the loss of aura primarily in mass-produced art — photography, cinema, news- paper journalism, and so on — Adorno insisted that this process also characterised so-called serious art. In the case of serious music specifically, loss of aura is reflected in the development of compositional tech- ue, with its focused concern with the formal laws of musical production. For Adorno, such ‘rationalisa- tion’ of musical practice is to be understood with respect to that of bourgeois society as a whole. Pro- cesses of rationalisation take place, not only in the aesthetic domain, but also in the spheres of the econ- ‘omy and of state administration. Economic rationalisa- tion refers to the situation in which individuals must pursue their material selfinterest by means of a caleu- lated adaptation to market laws. Administrative ratio- nalisation signifies the construction of a political bureaucracy in which civil servants attain their ends by submitting to the codified rules of professional conduct. In a similar way, musical rationalisation ‘means that the modern composer can achieve his or her aesthetic purposes only by adapting to the laws of musical technique. Yet in Adorno’s view, musical ‘laws’ — like those of economics and politics — are quite different from the laws of nature. They are prod- ucts of history, and so are subject to historical trans- "Wer Bennnin: “The Work of Ari the Age of Mechanica Reproduction’, in Mlmintions (New or, 1989), 217258 formation, Schoenberg's great achievement was pre- cisely to have demonstrated that what seemed to be the most basic and enduring substructure of Western ‘music — tonality — was in truth a human creation with no more than temporary validity.’ The avant- garde composer superseded tonality by following the objective historical tendency of the musical material itself, by setting free the dissonance that had already emerged in late Romantic music. In this way, accord- ing to Adorno, in the act of pursuing the autonomous demands of his own art, Schoenberg challenged the ‘most basic ideological mystification of bourgeois soci- ety. This mystification consists of the interpretation of historical products of human activity as natural, eter- nal forces. By divesting these forces of their crude, thing-like character, by recognising that they are human creations, we open them to the possibility of conscious change. ‘Adorno admitted that music is not able to represent objects outside of itself in the sense of depicting or creating an image of such objects. Nonetheless, he insisted that the musical work of art is capable of articulating social truth. With this claim, Adorno was not in the least raising the demand that music prove itself politically and socially relevant by delivering an affirmative message. He rejected the Gemein- schaftsmusik (community-music) of Hans Eisler as well as the Gebrauchsmusik (use-music) of Kurt Weill for attempting to do just that. Adorno believed instead that music is able to perform a progressive social role only by resisting easy communicability. The social content of music must be elaborated in the pursuit of technical mastery of the most advanced musical mate- rial. Through the exercise of such mastery, the ‘anti- nomies’ — the contradictions or tensions — of the for- ‘mal language of music come to express the contradic- tions of society itself. Adorno called the relationship between serious music and society a ‘mimetic’ one. Through mimesis, the musical work of art evokes social content in the sensuous medium of sound. Specifically, it calls for social change by speaking ‘the coded language of suffering’ According to Adorno, such language was especially well-represented by the free use of dissonance in Schoenberg's early ‘expres- sionism’, before the mechanical standardisation of twelve-tone technique set in. The suffering expressed by dissonance is pain atthe liquidation of the individu- al ego by late bourgeois society. In order to grasp more fully Adorno’s philosophy of music it is neces- sary to understand what this liquidation signifies. By means of a fusion of Marxian and Freudian con- cepts, Adorno argued that the individual ego is not a "See Theodor Adorno: Ploply of Madera Masi New York, 1979) "Theodor Adaro! ‘Oe the Soil Stuaion of Musi Tela, 35 (St Los 1978), 190 19